Dodgers brush aside Phils

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Dodger Rafael Furcal #15 points to the sky after hitting a home run in the second inning during a National League Championship Series baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday October 12, 2008, at Dodger Stadium. (Staff Photo by Keith Birmingham)

The Dodgers won a critical game on Sunday night, and they also won a critical battle. Only time will tell which one was more important.

What did become perfectly clear in the Dodgers’ 7-2 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series before a sellout crowd of 56,800, the largest in the history of Dodger Stadium, was that the guy the Dodgers sent to the front lines of that battle is fully capable of playing the warrior.

Hiroki Kuroda, the “rookie” right-hander who left his native Japan last winter to accept a three-year, $35.3 million contract from the Dodgers, proved to be worth every cent this time. Partly for the fact he pitched the Dodgers back into this thing by shutting down the Phillies on five hits over six dominating innings to cut their series lead to 2-1. And partly for the unmistakable message he sent with just one of his 84 pitches.

In the top of the third inning, with the Dodgers already leading by five, Kuroda threw a pitch just past the top of Phillies center fielder Shane Victorino’s helmet, the Dodgers’ long-awaited and perhaps-overdue answer to a series of inside pitches, brushback pitches and hit-by-pitches that had come the Dodgers’ way since the start of Game 2.

A visibly agitated Victorino – who had to have been anticipating the close shave after Dodgers catcher Russell Martin had been hit by a pitch in the first inning and brushed back again in the second – took two steps toward Kuroda and began jawing at him. Pointing first at his body and then at his head, Victorino seemed to be telling Kuroda that a purpose pitch should have been aimed at the former instead of the latter.

Two pitches later, Victorino grounded to first to end the inning, Nomar Garciaparra triumphantly holding the ball aloft as he jogged to the bag. Victorino then turned to Kuroda, who had jogged over to cover, and began jawing at him again. Kuroda, who by that time had started off the field, stopped and turned to face Victorino.

The obligatory benches-clearing fracas that immediately followed involved nothing more than a lot of yelling and a lot of guys being theatrically restrained by their own teammates. But with that, the Dodgers, who by most accounts including their own had been pushed around a bit in Game 2, had officially made their stand.

And Kuroda – who spent the past 14 seasons playing in a country where pitchers often apologize after hitting batters – had led the charge.

“I was trying to throw inside, and it just slipped out of my hand,” Kuroda said (through interpreter Kenji Nimura), recycling the same excuse Phillies starter Brett Myers had used for knocking down Martin and throwing a pitch behind Manny Ramirez’s head in the top of the first inning of Game 2.

Approached by reporters in the Phillies’ clubhouse after the game, Victorino warned them that he would walk away if anyone brought up the incident, and he made good on his threat when someone did. Minutes earlier, though, he did address the matter in a live, on-camera interview with the Fox network at the end of its game broadcast.

The series, by contrast, appears to be just beginning after the Phillies took the first two games at home with stunning ease.

“I think for the moment, we have the momentum,” Dodgers manager Joe Torre said. “We won a game, and we have to feel good about it, but they still have the advantage. Hopefully, we planted a seed of doubt in their minds. But these are two good clubs playing in the postseason. The only way to get to the postseason is to be able to handle failure. You get to the postseason by being able to dismiss that.”

Kuroda, sparked in large part by a five-run first inning by the Dodgers, dismissed it with remarkable efficiency. After giving up a two-out, RBI single to Pedro Feliz in the second inning, Kuroda retired the next 13 batters in a row through the sixth inning before running out of gas in the seventh. From the third through the sixth, the Phillies hit exactly two balls out of the infield while Kuroda struck out three and recorded seven groundball outs.

In two postseason starts, including the Game 3 clincher against the Chicago Cubs in the division series, Kuroda has allowed two runs on 11 hits over 123 innings. And if his first season with the Dodgers was a bit of a rollercoaster ride – he went an unremarkable 9-10 with a 3.73 ERA, sprinkling in a couple of complete-game shutouts along the way – he has forever cemented himself this month as a big-game pitcher.

His counterpart, Phillies lefty Jamie Moyer, mostly just cemented himself as an old pitcher in this one. A month shy of his 46 th birthday, the crafty veteran was anything but, getting tagged for six runs in 13 innings.The Dodgers batted around in the first inningworking him over for 30 pitches.

The Dodgers scored once before Moyer so much as recorded an out, doing so with three consecutive singles by Rafael Furcal, Andre Ethier and Manny Ramirez. Moyer then hit Martin in the left knee, Martin making no attempt whatsoever to get out of the way and getting away with it, to load the bases. After Moyer struck out Nomar Garciaparra looking, Casey Blake drove in another run with a single to shallow center. Matt Kemp then struck out, putting the Dodgers in danger of leaving the bases loaded.

But Blake DeWitt, the Dodgers’ rookie second baseman, then saved the rally by pulling a three-run triple into the right-field corner. The Phillies got one back in the second, but Rafael Furcal’s home run leading off the second pushed the lead back to five and set the stage for those third-inning hijinks.

Garciaparra’s RBI single in the fourth made it 7-1, and at that point, it was all over but the shouting. Well, actually the shouting was pretty much over by then, too, the Dodgers and Kuroda having done most of it with that one pitch and the Phillies having chosen – wisely, some would say, not to respond.

“I really don’t think this is anything that is going to be long lasting,” Torre said.